Weekly Review

U.S. president Donald Trump, who was once implicated alongside a Saudi arms dealer in a scheme to avoid paying sales taxes at a Manhattan jewelry store, visited Saudi Arabia, where he ate steak with ketchup, participated in a sword dance, and announced plans to sell the country more than $110 billion in U.S. arms.[1][2][3][4][5] Trump then visited Israel, where he said in a meeting in Jerusalem that he had “just got back from the Middle East,” canceled a speech before Israel’s parliament because he didn’t want to be heckled, and visited and signed the guestbook of the country’s Holocaust museum. “SO AMAZING + WILL NEVER FORGET!” wrote Trump, whose administration once omitted mention of Jewish people in a statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day.[6][7][8][9] Trump visited Belgium, where he reportedly ate “lots of” chocolates and then complained that he did not have a positive impression of the European Union because it took him two and a half years to get a license to open up a golf course in Ireland; a poll found that 54 percent of Americans believe Trump is “abusing the powers of his office”; and Trump shoved the prime minister of Montenegro.[10][11][12] It was reported that the FBI warned GOP congressman Dana Rohrabacher that the Russian government was attempting to recruit him as a spy; a recording was released of House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy saying he believed Russian president Vladimir Putin “pays” Trump and Rohrabacher; Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said that Congress “really actually isn’t” in “chaos”; and a congressional GOP candidate body slammed, punched, and broke the glasses of a journalist in Montana, was charged with assault, and then won the election. [13][14][15][16] The Congressional Budget Office concluded that the House GOP’s American Health Care Act would cost 23 million Americans their health insurance by 2026, and a federal budget proposal submitted by the Trump Administration was found to have contained a $2 trillion math error.[17][18] A leaked transcript of a recent call between Trump and Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte revealed that Trump told Duterte, who once said he would “be happy to slaughter” as many drug addicts as Adolf Hitler did Jewish people, was doing an “amazing job,” and that the United States had clandestinely stationed two nuclear submarines near North Korea and that he’ll “see what happens” with regard to their usage.[19][20] Israel changed its intelligence-sharing protocols with the United States after Trump divulged secret Israeli intelligence about the Islamic State to Russian officials, and a team of hackers reported that it would take only five minutes to infiltrate the Wi-Fi network of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club in Florida, where he has spent about one fifth of his presidency.[21][22][23] U.S. officials named Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as a “person of interest” in the FBI’s investigation into whether the president’s campaign colluded with the Russian government; it was revealed that Trump told Russian officials that the “great pressure” he faced over his campaign’s ties to Russia had disappeared after he fired the FBI director overseeing the bureau’s investigation into those ties; and it was reported that Marc Kasowitz, an attorney who has represented Trump’s companies in bankruptcy and fraud litigation, would serve during the Russia probe as private counsel to Trump, who once acquired a race horse named Alibi from a known mob associate, changed Alibi’s name to D.J. Trump, and then refused to pay for it.[24][25][26][27]

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We all know dementia by now: the organ of the brain breaking down in substance and function much as a heart or liver does. By the time a person dies from complications of Alzheimer’s disease, his or her brain is significantly smaller than its normal size. There are several major variants of this process, and the disorder’s progress takes many forms: insidious, incremental, dramatic, fast, and slow. The biology of loss is complicated and not entirely predictable; but in every case, memory, language, and motor control eventually slip away until a person finally sinks into silence and immobility. One could write volumes on the meaning of this gradual dissolving of a person — mustn’t it mean something?

No one would talk to me for this piece. Or rather, more than twenty women talked to me, sometimes for hours at a time, but only after I promised to leave out their names, and give them what I began to call deep anonymity. This was strange, because what they were saying did not always seem that extreme. Yet here in my living room, at coffee shops, in my inbox and on my voicemail, were otherwise outspoken female novelists, editors, writers, real estate agents, professors, and journalists of various ages so afraid of appearing politically insensitive that they wouldn’t put their names to their thoughts, and I couldn’t blame them.

Of course, the prepublication frenzy of Twitter fantasy and fury about this essay, which exploded in early January, is Exhibit A for why nobody wants to speak openly. Before the piece was even finished, let alone published, people were calling me “pro-rape,” “human scum,” a “harridan,” a “monster out of Stephen King’s ‘IT,’?” a “ghoul,” a “bitch,” and a “garbage person”—all because of a rumor that I was planning to name the creator of the so-called Shitty Media Men list. The Twitter feminist Jessica Valenti called this prospect “profoundly shitty” and “incredibly dangerous” without having read a single word of my piece. Other tweets were more direct: “man if katie roiphe actually publishes that article she can consider her career over.” “Katie Roiphe can suck my dick.” With this level of thought policing, who in their right mind would try to say anything even mildly provocative or original?

In the early Eighties, Andy King, the coach of the Seawolves, a swim club in Danville, California, instructed Debra Denithorne, aged twelve, to do doubles — to practice in the morning and the afternoon. King told Denithorne’s parents that he saw in her the potential to receive a college scholarship, and even to compete in the Olympics. Tall swimmers have an advantage in the water, and by the time Denithorne turned thirteen, she was five foot eight. She dropped soccer and a religious group to spend more time at the pool.

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Vets removed a six-pound tongue from a young Burmese moon bear who had been dragging it on the ground, a Vietnamese bile bear whose paws were amputated to make wine had learned to walk again, and the last dancing bears of Nepal were rescued.

The National Rifle Association sued Florida, the US president agreed to discuss nuclear weapons with the North Korean supreme leader who once called him a “dotard,” and an 89-year-old nun who was involved in a lawsuit trying to prevent pop star Katy Perry from purchasing a convent collapsed during a court appearance and died.

"Gun owners have long been the hypochondriacs of American politics. Over the past twenty years, the gun-rights movement has won just about every battle it has fought; states have passed at least a hundred laws loosening gun restrictions since President Obama took office. Yet the National Rifle Association has continued to insist that government confiscation of privately owned firearms is nigh. The NRA’s alarmism helped maintain an active membership, but the strategy was risky: sooner or later, gun guys might have realized that they’d been had. Then came the shootings at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, followed swiftly by the nightmare the NRA had been promising for decades: a dedicated push at every level of government for new gun laws. The gun-rights movement was now that most insufferable of species: a hypochondriac taken suddenly, seriously ill."